Last few meals in Shanghai

Shanghaiese cuisine at Lanxin Restaurant (兰心餐厅): sweet, greasy, dark, slightly smoky.

One interesting tidbit about this meal is that my friends and I actually had to wait about 30 minutes outside before getting a table. By Western standards this is pretty unspectacular, but for whatever reason you almost never wait for a table in Asia, and thus the wait at Lanxin struck me as unusual.

There are various theories for why you don't seem to wait at a Chinese restaurant. The ones that I like are that a) since most meals are served family-style, diners can start eating without having to wait for every plate to arrive, and b) in general, Asian diners don't tend to linger at the table once they've finished eating.

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The rather fine chicken tonkotsu ramen at Kin, a cafe and clothing store run by my friend Gary Wang. Gary is totally unafraid of claiming that this is the best bowl of ramen in all of Shanghai. All told, this might not actually be saying all that much, but anyway I suspect he is right.

Sorry about the mess--I didn't quite have the good sense to take a photo before I started eating.

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The following photos are from Lost Heaven, a Yunnan restaurant in the French Concession. The food was terrific but the decor and theme were on the garish side. When I walked out of the restaurant, there were at least half a dozen women dressed in some kind of tribal costume bidding me farewell in chorus. I did a double-take.

Samosas, with some sort of mint-cilantro chutney. This is the only time I've ever had anything describable as "chutney" in China.

Tea-leaf salad, which was sneakily spicy.

Dai tribe chicken with quail eggs.

Fish curry.

A puzzling and somewhat overwrought post-meal fruit plate.

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One evening I mentioned to my friends that I thought it would be fun to get a group of people together and eat a whole goat. A week later, we had over a dozen RSVPs, and my friend Terence was putting down a 400RMB deposit for a goat (全羊) at Xinjiang restaurant called Xiyake (西亚克). That's what's fun about China: things that would seem beyond the pale or plainly insane in the West just might be feasible.

Sadly the meal was not the savage ritual of flesh and grease that I expected. The restaurant rolled out the goat, not much larger than a suckling pig, and proceeded to carve the skinny beast into slightly more manageable bits. The consensus was that the goat was tasty but overcooked. The gristle-to-meat ratio was high.

One fellow mentioned that elsewhere, maybe in Mongolia or something, it is possible to order a spit-mounted goat that you carve and eat as it cooks over a flame. Each diner is given a knife with which to extract meat directly from the goat; the inside of the goat cooks as outer layers are removed and consumed. Now here was a meal worthy of pretending to be a viking, pirate, or horse-mounted barbarian nomad while listening to Led Zeppelin III.

We were each given a small dish at the start of the meal. Most people ended up using this dish to store the bones and unchewable bits of mutton.

Halfway through the meal I decided that I needed to use the dish for other purposes. I looked around the table and announced, "I declare independence from Western etiquette!" Then I turned my dish over and dumped everything onto the tablecloth.

My neighborhood

Here is a pre-breakfast walking tour of the working-class neighborhood near my apartment.

The gate of my apartment complex, facing Huangpi South Road (黄陂南路). At the start of the National Day holiday, the apartment managers had red lanterns strung up at the gate. The lanterns light up amber in the evenings, lending the entrance of the complex some much-needed warmth.

The view of the street outside of the front gate.

Junjun Xiaochi (骏骏小吃), a literal hole-in-the-wall restaurant across the street from my apartment. The food is prepared on the sidewalk stove and sold either as take-out or delivery. The woman in the green apron handles delivery duty using the pictured bike and styrofoam crate. Out on deliveries, she is always wearing the same bashful smile. She kind of reminds me of hobbits.

The intersection of Huangpi South Road and Hefei Road (合肥路), just north of my apartment. As far as I can tell, it is continuously occupied by traffic going in every cardinal direction. The stoplight here is more of a non-symbolic ornament than a means of organizing traffic. The reason why nobody dies is that nobody is driving quite fast enough.

Walking eastward down Hefei Road.

I feel as if my pictures don't quite do justice to the commotion and bustle of the street in the morning. These are streets in the classic sense of Jane Jacobs's Life and Death of the Great American Cities, wherein the activity of one's daily life is open and visible to the public.

The sidewalks are for business; if you want to move from point A to point B, you will often need to share the road with the cars and bicycles. What appears at first glance to be a disorganized and chaotic space actually operates on the rather civilized notion that cars aren't any more important than people.

A view into an old longtang (弄堂) neighborhood off of Hefei Road. These cramped lane houses are to Shanghai what the hutong (胡同) are to Beijing: a cramped, traditional form of housing whose rapid disappearance is emblematic of the pace of urban development.

A sight nearly unseen in the US: people relaxing in the street.

More street traffic on Hefei Road.

This clothing store was especially busy as I walked by, but I couldn't tell why.

Pants.

No pants.

A scooter repair shop.

This fellow sold produce from a wheeled cart. He was very popular, which I assumed was because his prices were good.

A fruit seller and patron.

Crispy-looking pastries.

A noodle merchant.

The noodle merchant's factory, exposed to the street.

Fresh seafood and other water-borne slimy things.

Crabs, eels, and clams.

Breakfast options almost always involve some kind of fried or grilled dough. The above merchant sold baked pies filled with egg, meat, or chives.

I opted for the quintessential Chinese breakfast: fried youtiao (油条) and sweet soy milk.

Youtiao are a lot like doughnuts: fried, greasy, and best when dipped. The combination with soy milk is squishy, crispy, warm, and slightly sweet.

This meal is nostalgic for me. I insisted on having it on one of my last mornings in Shanghai, even though I'm allergic to sweet soy milk. This is kind of a mystery to me, because I have no allergic response to edamame, tofu, or xian doujiang (咸豆浆), which are all basically various solid or liquid forms of the same thing.

Eileen Chang

Last Sunday I finally caught the China bug. This was karma; I'd been talking for four weeks how I was waiting for it to happen, and then it happened.

It started as a head cold, and over the course of the week it moved southward through my organs, like a viral Sherman's March to the Atlantic of my lower bowels.

Being sick is boring. Mostly I sat in my bed, surfing the web and trying to avoid any activity that involved sustained concentration. I stopped feeling hungry and couldn't taste any food. Sometimes I'd watch depressing movies. I got cranky. At the supermarket, the cashier tried to explain to me (I think) that there was no bulk discount for the 3-pack of Kleenex that I was buying, and that it might be cheaper to switch to something else. Just let me buy my goddamn kleenex was what I was thinking. I just pretended like I didn't understand what she was saying.

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Lemme mention one of the isolated highlights from an otherwise ill-spent week:

I finished reading Written on Water, a book of essays by Eileen Chang, who is today most famous as the author of "Lust, Caution". Chang, like Borges, is regarded as one of those writers who was good enough for a Nobel Prize but somehow missed out due to political intrigue and circumstance. I never read any of her plays or novels, but her essays are very good--there are sparkles of genius on every page, even when her subject matter is ostensibly trivia. Most of her writing is about bourgeois consumer lifestyle, all clothes and opera and middle-brow contemporary novels. I find it funny that the 1940s Shanghai that she evokes in her writing comes off as so much more sophisticated and intricate than the Shanghai I wake up to every day.

Here is Eileen Chang on Chinese haute couture:

This amassing of countless little points of interest, this continual digression, reckless and unreasonable, this dissipation of energy on irrelevant matter, marked the perennial attitude toward life of the leisure class in China. Only the most leisured people in the most leisurely country in the world could appreciate the wonder of these details. It certainly took tremendous amounts of time and artistry to create fine distinctions between a hundred lineal designs that were similar but not the same and just as much effort to appreciate the differences among them.

And on the dialectic of male privilege and fashion:

Today, Western-style men's suits are cautious and colorless, adhering as closely and as conservatively as possible to the established image of a foreign gentleman. This is notwithstanding the fact that even Chinese-style garments have been trapped for many years within a limited palette of gray, coffee brown, and dark blue and restricted as well by extremely monotonous fabrics and patterns. Men enjoy far more freedom than women, but purely on account of this single and all too conspicuous unfreedom, I would not want to be a man.

And here's an astute observation on the role of idioms in different languages:

Ninety percent of what passes for wit in China consists in the skillful use of set phrases. Little wonder, then that Chinese students of western languages invariably rely on handbooks full of idiomatic phrases, which they believe need only be linked in grammatical sequence in order to produce good essays.

And finally, here is Chang's rejection of motherly love as human virtue, which I think is a timely observation in light of the current vogue of mainstream evolutionary psychology:

The self-sacrificing love of a mother is indeed a virtue, but a virtue only within a moral code that has been passed down to us by our animal forebears. Since even domestic animals seem to share this virtue, there's no particular reason to be proud of ourselves on this account. Instinctual love of this sort is merely an animal virtue, not one of those qualities that separates us from the beasts. What does distinguish mankind from the beasts are our higher degree of consciousness and higher powers of comprehension. While this approach to the question may appear excessively logical, overly dispassionate, or lacking in humanity, real humanity lies in a refusal to accept merely animal virtues as an ethical standard for human beings.

On mostly wheat-based foods

We begin with noodles, as we always should.

The famous fish noodles (黄鱼面) at A Niang noodle shop (阿娘面). The restaurant had been remodeled since the last time I lived in Shanghai, when the dining room was an open lot across the street from the kitchen and cash register. The prices appear to have kept pace with the upgrade in facilities: a bowl of noodles, plus salted collard greens and chili potatoes, cost me just under 30RMB, which is an astronomical per-capita rate for what remains in essence a street-food meal.

As I write this, I'm realizing how preoccupied I've been with how much or how little things cost in Shanghai. For some reason the experience of being here is heavily mediated by the prices of things.

Part of the assumed appeal of life in China is how inexpensive things are supposed to be, how cheap it is to buy food, pirated DVDs, or the labor of maids, cab drivers, or masseuses, and thus a lot of attention is bound to be paid to how that expectation is fulfilled or thwarted in practice. Another factor is that prices seem to reflect very closely both the pace and unevenness of socioeconomic development--within three years you see your favorite bowl of noodles jump in price, and you also see how that bowl of noodles is still a tiny fraction of the cost of an inferior meal in any upscale shopping mall.

Soup noodles with chili potatoes (辣酱面) and a side of fried pork loin, from the hole-in-the-wall noodle shop near the gate of my apartment complex. The pork curls upward and away from the oil during the frying process, forming a sort of crispy basin into which the chef deposits a ladleful of dark vinegar.

The owner of the restaurant is affable and wiry. He mostly perches on a little table outside the entrance where some of the regulars eat. He could tell right away that I wasn't familiar with the menu, and after recommending me the above meal, he noted with pride that people line up every day to eat at his shop. Apparently, the television drama Wo Ju (蜗居) had also featured his restaurant at some point. He pointed at a corner of the room where he'd served noodles to one of the show's protagonists.

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Xiao Yang Shengjian (小杨生煎), just north of People's Square and among the most famous of Shanghai's pan-fried dumpling purveyors.

A source of great stress to the snack-seeking tourist is the bewildering and improvisitorial nature of the Shanghaiese food-ordering process. Some restaurants employ the order-eat-pay cycle, familiar to any Westerner, while others demand payment upon ordering or receipt of food. In many restaurants there is no obvious cashier or server, and you are left to approach the person in the room who appears most likely to work there and deliver to him or her your order.

At Xiao Yang's, you wait in line to place your order with the unimpressed and vaguely shrewlike cashier, who prints out a receipt, which you are then to display to various restaurant staff. By some managerial alchemy, your order eventually makes its way piecemeal to the relevant parties within the various kitchens designated for soups or dumplings.

Shengjianbao (生煎包/生煎馒头) are structurally similar to the more familiar xiaolongbao soup dumplings: a flour skin, filled with wad of pork and a greasy, salty brine. You also eat them using a similar method, first biting a small hole into the side of the dumpling and sucking out the soup, and then dunking the remainder into vinegar and consuming with hasty munches.

What makes shengjianbao distinct is their large size and crispy bottom skin, similar to potstickers.

Two lia (俩), or eight dumplings (10RMB), and a can of Wang Lao Ji (王老吉), a kind of soda version of herbal tea, marketed for its health benefits and spurious historical pedigree (5RMB). Note: this is too much for one person to eat.

Five shengjianbao down, three two go. By this time I am starting to feel sluggish, with dark shoots of regret sprouting in my mind that I wash away with another gulp of hypersweet Wang Lao Ji.

A lot of customers at Xiao Yang's are Cantonese-speaking tourists from Hong Kong, and who are by mainland standards almost obsequiously polite in their table manners, cautiously dipping their dumplings in small saucers of vinegar. But when I eat shengjian, I employ the local expediency of pouring a huge amount of vinegar over the entire platter, instead using the sauce dish as receptacle to catch any soup that squirts out from the dumpling.

Eight shengjianbao consumed at the end of a minor culinary marathon. Upon the conclusion of the meal, I received high-fives from Buddha, Jesus, and Abraham Lincoln, who arrived on a translucent 1964 Chevy Impala that could fly, although it just looked like it was driving through the air. I then staggered through the subway system and down the avenues toward my apartment and my bedroom, where I slept until past dinner time.

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Incidentally, Xiao Yang's is directly across the street from Jiajia Tangbao, the soup dumpling restaurant I mentioned in my last entry. The latter should be strictly regarded as a brunch option--arriving after 11:30AM will guarantee a minimum wait of 30 minutes, and the dumplings will routinely sell out by 2PM.

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Two fine gentleman relax at the park across the street from the posh Xintiandi shopping district.

A couple of days ago, I was sitting in roughly the same spot, choking down a few incredibly salty Xi'an meat pies I'd bought from a nearby stall. On the adjacent street there were a couple of guys loading a Lamborghini onto the bed of tow truck. The event was totally unexceptional to me, save for the fact that it seemed to mesmerize all passers-by. Office workers in the surrounding high-rises pressed their faces up against the glass. A tour group that had been moving through the park clustered on the sidewalk to take pictures. Old couples strolling past paused agog.

This went on for five or ten minutes, quite a long time when all you're doing is staring at something. Fancy sports cars are apparently still a spectacle in Shanghai, even in one of its most opulent corners.

Shanghai Potpurri II: Potpurri Strikes Back

The enormous traffic circle and pedestrian bridge in Lujiazui (陆家嘴), on a muggy wet day. The current stretch of thunderstorms has gone on for a week now, and admittedly it's bringing me down a little.

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Shanghai's first Apple Store, in Pudong. Wide-eyed and deep-pocketed pilgrims enter via a spiral staircase under a hollow glass column, which looks cool but is actually kind of a pain in the ass to navigate, and are then greeted by a full spread of expensive Apple gimmickry, like the evil android version of Willy Wonka's chocolate room. The wares are marked up by 20% over US prices, despite the fact that most of it is manufactured by low-wage labor just a few hundred miles away in Shenzhen.

I have a difficult time coming up with a supply-side reason why most luxury goods, from food to clothing to electronics, are more expensive in Shanghai than in the US. But if consumer demand can support no less than three Tiffany's outlets within shouting distance of one another, then it can probably afford MacBooks at an extra premium.

This is the same town where you can buy a full breakfast for two RMB, or about 30 US cents. It's hard to imagine any other place on the planet where there is such a huge difference between the cheapest things and the most expensive things.

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Upon arriving in Shanghai, I unpacked my guitar pedals and plugged the 110-volt AC adapter for my MicroPOG into a 220-volt Chinese wall outlet. This was a classic expat noob maneuver and inexcusable for someone who has lived abroad for as much time as I have. Fortunately, this usually just destroys the power supply, and spares the device itself. And so I found myself on the market for a new AC adapter.

Plan A was to head off to East Jingling Road (金零东路) near downtown, which has a quarter-mile stretch consisting exclusively of instrument stores. Most of these stores sell pianos, knock-off guitars, and traditional Chinese instruments. The ones that sell rock equipment were useless for my purposes--they either didn't know what I was talking about, or sold very particular and bizarre equipment, such as an AC adapter that accepted a minimum of 180 volts of input (according to the internet, the only places that appear to offer such a weird voltage out of a standard wall outlet are Equitorial Guinea and certain parts of Afghanistan).

Thus I turned to the exciting world of Chinese online retail, and began a herculean, week-long effort to figure out how to pay for something on Taobao, China's massive and bewildering answer to eBay and Amazon.

For a semi-literate Mac/Chrome user, about 70-80% of the Chinese internet appears to be broken, oftentimes in such an arcane and exotic manner that it appears to imply not so much incompetence on the part of the web developer as it does openly malicious intent. For example, many Chinese websites employ a Flash- or JavaScript-enabled virtual keyboard that you operate with your mouse, presumably as a means to thwart keyboard sniffing malware that could steal, say, your credit card information. Taobao routes Visa and MasterCard payments through the Agricultural Bank of China's website, and the latter's virtual keyboard system doesn't work in any browser available to OSX. So I went as far as calling my cousin in Taiwan via Skype so he could use Internet Explorer on his work PC to punch in the order. When that got too cumbersome, I finally wrangled some PC time from a guy I just met in Shanghai, and then I discovered that using international credit cards just wasn't going to fly--I tried several different cards, and the result of every attempt was a cryptic DENIED message. I'd used my credit card all the time in regular stores, but here I could only shrug and contemplate the Chinese national mantra, mei banfa (没办法): nothing you can do.

Finally, after squinting at Taobao's menu system for some time, I learned that you can pay COD for an extra 10-15RMB. This discovery was a stunning coup. After much struggle and exertion, I had slain the minotaur in the Cretan labyrinth of Taobao's payment system. The only problem here was that I received no confirmation email or notification, and no specific information about when the delivery and payment were actually supposed to take place. I finally got a phone call an hour before delivery asking if I would be home to receive a package, which by this time was a totally unexpected and welcome courtesy. The guy was still 10 minutes late, but I guess nothing's perfect.

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Petty Reason #421 why life in China is annoying: I woke up this morning and realized I'd eaten all of my yogurt, so I rode my bike down the street to the local supermarket. As of a few years ago, most stores in most major Chinese cities charge extra for bags, as a way to disincentivize plastic consumption and littering. Since I didn't bring my messenger bag, I had to pay RMB0.2 for a plastic bag at the checkout counter.

On the way back home, the bag burst open along the bottom seam and spilled my yogurt containers into the street. I had to stop in an intersection to pick them up, and then I rode back home with one hand steering the bike and the other hand tenuously gripping the yogurt. This was an interesting but not very enjoyable bike ride.

You could say, hey man, bags just break sometimes, but I find myself having a hard time giving China the benefit of the doubt. Sure, this ain't exactly melamine-tained milk here, but only in China do you pay for a plastic bag, only to have it inexplicably break on you while you're riding down a busy street.

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Hamlet existentialism, 21st-century Shanghai Edition.

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The best steamed soup dumplings (小笼包) in the world, at Jiajia Tangbao (佳家汤包) near People's Square. This uncompromising feast is the best meal I've had in Shanghai and cost all of 36RMB (US$5.34). In its own way, though, it's a high-maintenance meal, since you have to show up at 11AM if you don't want to wait in line, and you can't arrive too late in the afternoon, or else they'll run out of food. Also, the waitress there is a kind of a bitch.

Shanghai Potpurri

The world's largest Uniqlo outlet, on West Nanjing Road. Uniqlo is a Japanese clothing brand roughly equivalent to Gap, although here in China it's more or less a luxury brand and seems to command a 50% markup over domestic Japanese prices.

A new shopping center in Xintiandi (新天地), which insists that DRESSING IS A WAY OF LIFE. Shanghai is the nouveau riche writ large, in glass and concrete; it has yet to evolve any kind of high-brow tact vis-a-vis the obscene amount of money that flows into this city. Instead what you see is an unironic and unqualified celebration of wealth and consumption. Nearby, there is a community of high-rise apartments named "Richgate", and a little over the way, a brand-new development called Sinan Mansions promises such extravagances as 40,000RMB-per-night hotel villas (nearly US$6000 if you are keeping score).

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Old Chinese etiquette prevails on the streets of Shanghai, where traffic lights and painted lane dividers are exposed as the impotent theoretical constructs that they are.

A routine tactic of the Shanghai urban cyclist is to ride willfully into an intersection as the light turns red, and then to renege slightly and stop, such that the full length of the cyclist's vehicle is encroached within the intersection. After a week of braving the mean streets of Shanghai, a grim survival instinct has largely supplanted my LA-bred commuter road rage, but the latter will still boil over on occasion. I sometimes think: why did you just stop in the middle of the intersection? why did you even enter the intersection? if you had to insist on entering the intersection, why did you not then simply proceed through the intersection, so as not to thoroughly impede the large wave of unrushing traffic? is it that you were completely unaware of the large wave of onrushing traffic? etc. etc. I then think: I am so going to blog about this unbelievable and absurd practice. That will show you, you assholes.

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During my search for a rehearsal studio, I stumbled upon various internet articles about 0093, a rock collective that has supposedly incubated many of Shanghai's up-and-coming indie rock bands. Their online forum had advertised rentable practice space, so I decided to go there and investigate.

The listed address was 1228 Quxi Road, which brought me to a Sichuan hotpot restaurant. Upon inquiring within, I was scolded by the house matron and hastily waved off to the unmarked metal door next to the restaurant.

The sign above the door says nothing about a rehearsal studio or rock music. It is actually an advertisement for mooncake, the Chinese pastry traditionally eaten during the Midautumn Festival.

The metal doors led to a kitchen of suspect hygene. In the back was a large pile of discarded construction material. A kitchen boy holding what looked to be a large chunk of raw chicken meat assured me that I could continue over and past the junk pile.

This brought me to a stairwell and down into an old bomb shelter.

At the bottom of the stairwell, there was a dark room with an old couch that I probably would not sit on. Nobody seemed to be around. The ground was covered in soot and drain water. Down the hall, there were several locked doors, which I assumed were lockout studios that had been rented out long-term. I found one unlocked studio where a fellow was practicing a drum beat. He was wearing headphones plugged into a metronome, and didn't notice me when I poked my head in. I decided not to bother him and left.

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In attendance at Yuyintang (育音堂), one of Shanghai's "oldest" indie rock venues. I employ scare-quotes because of the nascent and slightly colonial nature of the Shanghai music scene. Yuyintang has only been around since 2004, and despite the fact this show was advertised as a "local band" showcase, the majority of the band members and audience members alike were foreign-born. Suffice it to say the pedigree of progressive pop music in China isn't exactly sterling.

Case in point: the best band of the evening were The Beat Bandits, who are composed of a British drummer, a Japanese bass player who looks kind of like Elvis, a Japanese keyboard player who I sort of wished was a better dancer, and a really awesome guitar player who I coulda sworn was a dorky Chinese guy on account of his facial hair and coiffure and sartorial habits, but who I now actually suspect is Japanese as well. These guys could really wail.

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The World Financial Center and the Jinmao Tower, twin phallic icons of the eastern Shanghai skyline.

The 100th-floor observation deck on the World Financial Center, still misleadingly advertised in the brochure as the "world's highest observation deck". I presume that the Burj Khalifa now has it beat pretty handily.

The view toward the Pearl Oriental Tower and northwestern Shanghai.

Century Avenue, and endless development extending eastward, over what was farmland and countryside just a decade or two ago.